Also, this thing was turning into a white elephant - between mismanagement by the physicists and cost over-runs (gee, from Government contractors?!? No way!) this was going to turn into a huge money pit. Anyway, the Europeans did it better

I agree with AC. I love science and I'd love to see more science projects but to enforce at least halfway reasonable government spending, there must be consequences for overspending. They couldn't get their costs under control and showed no sign of getting better. Write them off and move on.

Also, this thing was turning into a white elephant - between mismanagement by the physicists

The problem was not physicists but politicians. Large colliders like the LHC and SSC require a chain of accelerators of increasing energy to inject protons into them. The US already has just such a chain but in Fermilab near Chicago, not in the middle of Texas. As I understand it the decision to move the SSC from Illinois to Texas was made by politicians for political reasons. Since the entire lower energy accelerator complex had to be built from scratch in Texas this literally doubled the cost of the project.

The damage to US physics goes well beyond the loss of the project though. There were many non-US groups involved in the SSC and its cancellation has meant that many are extremely adamant that future international accelerator projects should not be built in the US due to a complete lack of faith in the US funding system.

A serious series of failures to be able to actually make magnets and detectors to the specs physicists made -- was what really did it. They promised a lot more than it turned out they could deliver, and proved that by not delivering on the preliminary prototypes, and after spending money ahead of schedule.

For once, the politicians did the right thing, actually. These clowns weren't even in the same class as the guys are CERN. Hate to say it, I'm American and wish it were otherwise, but really, go read the reports. This was a bunch of people who thought conceptually trivial meant actually trivial. Nope, and most people outside ivory towers know that. Even some politicians.

You do realize that Americans engineered many parts of the LHC right? Including some of the accelerator magnets and parts of the detectors? This has nothing to do with nationality, probably just technological advancement that happened in the 10-15 years between projects.

I think you are being too hard on your fellow countrymen - and I say that as a non-American, not associated with any US institute and member of an LHC experiment. Part of the difference between true, groundbreaking research and the stuff industry typically does is that you are working well beyond the bleeding edge. Building something which your physics says is possible but which nobody has actually ever done is always fraught with unexpected issues simply because nobody has any real experience.

But calculating a level of certainty is, in fact, a theoretical exercise.

...which is only as accurate as the available data wil allow. Given what Columbus knew he was very certain that if he sailed west he would find India. How could he know that there was a huge landmass in the way that would make it practically impossible for him to do so? When you are doing something that has never before been done all you have are best guesses based on extrapolation and you cannot expect that to be correct all the time.

Nothing new here. Putting the Manned Spacegraft Center (err Lyndon B. Johnson Manned Spacecraft Center) in a pestilential swamp outside of Houston instead of the perfectly fine pestilential swamps outside the Kennedy Space Flight Center increased costs for Apollo and the Shuttle significantly. NASA is spread all over the country in large part to 'spread the wealth'. Same with the military except you have some justification for not putting all your targets in one place.

The SSC was three times the radius, which explains how it was going to achieve three times the energy, as you're basically limited by how strong a magnetic field you can make to bend the particles around the ring. And its sheer sze must have also been a big part of why it was so damn expensive.

Not to worry, someday someone will start up another super-collider project from scratch

I've actually seen this happen with some projects. The product is over deadline, so it gets cancelled. 6 months later a similar product gets started. Staff revives old design docs since they're still relevant. Management slaps them down and says "I told you we canceled that project!"

I remember when Michigan was vying for this project, touting how it would enhance Michigan's scienterrific credentials, bring more research bucks to University of Michigan, etc. Now that it's in ruins, it would still fit in with much of southeast Michigan - the rust belt - Bay City, Saginaw, Flint and the Detroit area. I wonder if they could somehow turn it into an underground D&D theme park?

I took a look at Dungeon Masters Handbook, and it seems to devote quite a lot of pages on how to keep the players from straying from the tracks. Various Internet forums back this up. So why would a single-corridor dungeon be a problem?

It's bad enough what they *wanted* to call it — The Ronald Reagan Center for High Energy Physics (presumably for his previous work in the field of deciduous pollution vectors and the Grand Unification Theory of Vegetables and Condiments. Look it up, kids.)

I don't remember it that way. It was a "big science/little science" fight, if I recall.

The whole SSC thing got started under the Reagan administration, and I *especially* remember the impact when Reagan came in, because I was a student at MIT and had jobs in many research labs around the institute. The Reagan administration did a huge reorientation of the national research program. The Reagan administration had an ideology about research that pulled the plug on a lot of applied research, because that should be done by the private sector. The exception was in DoD funded research, which got a lot *more* focused on immediate applications -- specifically things that were immediately applicable to making weapons -- and so even DoD funded researcher felt the pinch. Although I disagree with Reagan's science policy, it kind of makes sense from their point of view. Making and using weapons is a legitimate government function in their view, as was research that was so far from having practical application that it could not conceivably attract any kind of private sector investment.

The SSC was the kind of thing that the Reagan could get behind. It was by no stretch of the imagination *applied* research. It was a big and showy counterargument to the charge that the administration was "anti-science", and in the grand scheme of things, the $4.4 billion was a pittance to an administration that was going to build a 600 ship navy, and which actually *doubled* federal spending over its tenure. The problem is you can't conjure a direction change in a nation's research establishment overnight. People are in the middle of their careers, and you can't conjure new careers out of thin air. A generation of researchers had to scramble harder than ever for funding, and the funds for the SSC would have purchased a *lot* of small science.

One of the political drawbacks with the SSC is that the economic impact couldn't be spread around the way defense contractors do to build a support base in Congress. Somebody elsewhere suggested physicists near losing SSC sites lobbied their congressmen to kill the SSC, but that doesn't really make sense. Once SSC was killed, nobody was going to build another one. The jealous nuclear physicists who would supposedly have an ax to grid would be better off having the SSC built in Texas than not built at all. But I do think it's likely there was a lot of political opposition from scientists who were "small science" advocates. Not that scientists of any stripe individually or collectively have much clout, but if legislators heard opinions from scientists on the project, the bulk of opinions were likely critical. The kinds of problems any project on this scale would have could easily be spun as imminent disaster.

Newt did not kill this. Clinton and dems did. Clinton did it because it was going to be about 40 billion to build, and CLinton wanted a balanced budget. Personally, I was fine with it being killed. Engineering reports SAID that it should not be located in Texas, but in Illnois. Bush, wright, etc pushed this through even though they KNEW that final costs for texas was around 40 billion. Had they done Fermi Labs, it really would have costs little AND have been done on schedule.

" But the budget ran out of control and the project was scrapped in 1993."

No, it was killed by the politics of high-energy physics. In a nutshell, those working at the competing research sites who lost the bid to be the SSC location, basically got their congressmen to fight and kill the SSC project.

polotics did get involved. The US built the SLA and was involved in paying for the LHC. I'm not surprised that funding for the SSC was withdrawn.A lot of europe and the US was involved in the LHC. Probably not a good plan as the SSC was a stunning idea. Not everything works out well.

It is these types of things that inspire kids to get an education. It was frequent trips to NASA that inspired me to become a technical person. It was observing real scientists doing real science that taught me to be a scientist. We cannot just wave out hands around a beg and plead for students to study math and science, and for teach to competently present the subject. Without real experiences what will the teacher present? Dull facts out of books they have read. Without the ability to see real science what will the students learn? That these things are what far away people do, with no relation to their local opportunities.

This is just one of those short sighted things we do because missiles are more exciting that basic science. A generation of US scientists should be considered loss as a result, and a generation of people able to teach the next generation about science is lost as well. How many billions of dollars is being spent to bootstrap science programs based on pictures in books when we could have have science based on real world experience.

We cannot just wave out hands around a beg and plead for students to study math and science, and for teach to competently present the subject. Without real experiences what will the teacher present? Without the ability to see real science what will the students learn?

Evolution or ID. It's the only thing that people are fighting over, thus it gets all the attention.

These types of things, and these ruins specifically, tell kids that maybe getting an education is overrated. All the people involved in the SSC project had an education, but apparently not the power to prevent it from becoming a dollar black hole.

If I were a US citizen, I'd demand. that these installations totally disappear from the map and all references to it be removed from press, books and the internet, because the SSC incident represents a national science hall of shame.

I'm a US citizen, and I want these installations to stand as monuments for how bad this country is for science, and as a warning for kids to not bother going into science, unless they plan to move to another country after they finish their degrees.

Trying to hide the truth doesn't help anything. We as a nation have to face the fact that we're quickly turning into a 3rd-world backwater, and there's simply nothing that can be done about it because it's what a majority of our citizens want.

If I were a US citizen, I'd demand. that these installations totally disappear from the map and all references to it be removed from press, books and the internet, because the SSC incident represents a national science hall of shame.

Then perhaps it should be put in a hall of shame, rather than erased from history? "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it", and all that.

Oh, and George Orwell's here too. He'd like to have a few words with you.

It is these types of things that inspire kids to get an education. It was frequent trips to NASA that inspired me to become a technical person. It was observing real scientists doing real science that taught me to be a scientist. We cannot just wave out hands around a beg and plead for students to study math and science, and for teach to competently present the subject. Without real experiences what will the teacher present? Dull facts out of books they have read. Without the ability to see real science what will the students learn? That these things are what far away people do, with no relation to their local opportunities.

Sadly, I understand that from the other point of view. My childhood was distinctly devoid of anyone or anything even remotely interested in science and engineering, and my school education seemed to take the attitude that 2 hours a week copying out of text books was all the science education a person would need (I had only 6 months of genuinely interesting science education in my whole school career- and only because my teacher for those two terms funded a great deal of experiments out of her own pocket).

Care to explain how multiculturalism is anti-education? I have no idea what you are getting at. And while some environmentalists may not be well grounded in science environmentalism as a whole is not anti-science at all.

I merely corrected amRadioHed's assertion. A lot of (if not most) political ideologies and factions have anti-education and anti-scientific beliefs. It's foolish to gloat on such things when the belief systems you defend have the same flaws.

What do you mean by "evolution isn't 'science' because it is a theory, and theories aren't science"? How is that any different from saying "a slice of bread isn't a sandwich"? Science observes reality, takes measurements, and produces theories. The theory of gravity and the theory of evolution are two such theories. That evolution and biogenesis are real phenomena isn't even a debatable proposition.

Reagan and his band of merry dolts didn't mind running the nation into massive deficit to give tax cuts to the rich and let the military run wild, but they couldn't allow spending on a science facility that might have actually gotten us somewhere. That wouldn't be as wise as giving corporations tax breaks to ship their factories overseas...(for the irony impaired, that was ironic).

Imagine if we already FOUND the Biggs particle, or the graviton, or figured out how to control the magnetic bottle around fusion. Twenty-plus years of research was lost so we could "save money", money we pissed away instead to cause the first tsunami of our current massive deficits.

It's "Keynesian nonsense" when the left does deficit spending; it's the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981" or the "Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001" when the right does it. Sigh... And always remember the "Tax Reform Act of 1986", billed by Reagan as "tax simplification", but where we lost the deduction for interest on consumer loans. Simplification my left testicle...

The goal of an economy is to make the stuff. As in, the stuff that people want and need.

The government can try to guess what that is, but every hour of a worker's time that the government directs is an hour that isn't spent making the stuff.. It doesn't matter whether they "legitimately" took that time at the point of a gun, or sneakily took the time by printing more tokens when no one was looking....

This should be an easy challenge, right? find some examples of situation

You do realise that your precious 'economy' wouldn't be worth a wank if not for thousands of years of government spending?

Pretty much every modern industry is the direct result of massive government stimulus. Left to its own devices, the market wouldn't have anything to sell at all. Even Walmarts ability to sell you some plastic junk from China wouldn't be possible without centuries of state investment in military technology. And you can forget aviation...

So for an additional 8 billion dollars, we could have had this incredible science resource. The hundreds of billions spend on bail outs and trillions spent on wars since then puts that and our current priorities in perspective.

I am not 100% sure how having a bigger particle accelerator peen is that much better

Okay, let me spell it out for you in terms having nothing to do with the size of America's wang (and how did Florida enter the conversation anyway?):

A particle accelerator 3 times as powerful as the design spec for the LHC, 15-20 years earlier.

It's not about pride, it's about physics. Physics that requires high energies to explore. We're still waiting for the LHC to answer questions that we could have answered over a decade ago, and there are other questions the LHC can't answer which the SSC could have.

Instead, here we are in 2011, still waiting to find out if a fundamental prediction of our current physics will be borne out or if we need to rework it entirely. Just like we have been for decades.

If you want your collisions to produce really exotic products e.g. the Higgs boson, you need high energy collisions which means your particles have to be travelling really fast. If you want your particles to be travelling really fast, you need a lot of distance to get them up to speed. If you build your particle accelerator as a straight line, you only have so much distance to get them up to speed. If you build it as a circle, you effectivle

As far as I understood it, the budget was pretty well under control. It's just that the Republican Congress did not want to spend $$ on basic research. My wife was working on it, and if it had gone ahead, we would have been in Austin, TX. instead of Batavia, IL where my wife is a physicist at Fermi Lab. My father, also a physicist, was involved as well, but he was trying to get the collider to be situated in Colorado, where he worked...:-)

They chose Texas which has some of the HARDEST GROUND IN THE USA. Few build basements there. The reason is that it is just not worth the costs of doing this. Instead, SSC SHOULD have gone to Illinois, where they would have been done in less time than was devoted to Texas. The question is, why did Texas win? Well, for the same reason that Texas was given LOADS of money from the USA under both Bushes.

To put it in perspective, the supercollider cost about $8 billion over ALL its years.
By contrast the nuclear fission industry received $38 billion in taxpayer loan guarantees in a single year, and the CBO projects that it will default on more than half of them. That's about $20 billion in taxpayer money. In one year. And that doesn't include direct subsidies, the eight year federal tax credit, the $2 billion dollar cost overrun fund, and debt waivers.

Exactly. It's like "good cop bad cop", with "good" and "bad" depending on who's in power at the moment, and which issue you're discussing. The Democrats had control of Congress between 2007 and 2010, and control of the White House too between 2009-now, and despite a 2-year period there where they could have done pretty much anything they wanted, all they did was whine about Republican "obstructionism" (what, control of two branches of government isn't enough to cut out the silliness?), and do nothing but

You can't reasonably compare budgets for scientific research that may or may not eventually produce usable results after many years to loans for critical infrastructure without which our country would not function.

That, and the fact that both the SSC and the Lydon B Johnson Space Center in Houston (ISS mission control) are in Texas, and funding both projects would have been funneling an absurd amount of money there.